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Police said she snuffed out their lives by putting her hand over their mouths, then placed the bodies in a car that she pushed over an embankment into the Edisto River.

Police at the time said she confessed after initially lying about the deaths and trying to make them look accidental.

'She was a mother that was unemployed. She had no means of taking care of her children,' then-Sheriff Larry Williams said in 2010.

Culpable: The prosecutor at her plea hearing earlier this month, pictured, said she accepted responsibility for what she did as she broke down in tears

Now and then: Duley pictured arriving at a hearing in 2010 (left), and pictured today in court (right), heavily cuffed and wiping away tears

'The responsibility of being a mom was a bit much for her. She was living with her mother. I believe she was fed up with her mother telling her that she couldn't take care of the children, or she wasn't taking care of the children.

‘She just wanted to be free.' Emotional testimony came from family members supporting Duley, a single mom who said she had been depressed.

'She snapped on August 15,' Pascoe said on Friday. 'There was no evidence that she had been planning this out.'

A state-appointed forensic psychiatrist found last summer that Duley suffered from mental illness but that she knew right from wrong and knew what she was doing when she killed her children, Pascoe said.

The father of Duley's children was never located, the Orangeburg County Sheriff's Office said.

Horror: Police said she snuffed out her sons' lives by putting her hand over their mouths, then placed the bodies in a car that she pushed over an embankment into the Edisto River (pictured)

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Mentally-ill mother admits suffocating her two toddlers, strapping them in car seats, and dumping vehicle in river